


watershed

by historymiss



Category: Gideon the Ninth
Genre: Gen, post ending fic, spoilers kinda
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-12
Updated: 2020-05-13
Packaged: 2021-02-28 07:14:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22680055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/historymiss/pseuds/historymiss
Summary: In which both Coronabeth and Camilla are alone in their grief
Comments: 8
Kudos: 50





	1. Chapter 1

Camilla finds Corona where they left her. Still in that ruined laboratory-cum-bedroom, all out of sobs but giving it her very best to dredge up more. As she stutters and heaves in hysteric breaths, Camilla notes that her spittle is faintly flecked with red.

Emperor above.

She doesn’t have the energy for this.

“Corona...” she can’t remember the girl’s full name. Maybe a nickname will be better? Camilla extends a hand, like you would to a frightened animal.

Corona regards it with blank and scorching hatred. 

“I don’t want pity.” She hiccups, through pink-stained teeth. Camilla feels her growing headache worsen, develop a few legs, start to crawl behind her eyes.

“We need to wait for the rescue shuttle.” Camilla hates how even her voice is. Like nothing’s happened. Like the world didn’t end when Palamedes exploded in the name of a woman he’d never even met. 

Corona wrinkles her nose, so incongruously petty that Camilla almost laughs.

“Go away.” She rakes her hands through hair gone ratty with blood. Her eyes have the hollow, far away look of someone standing on a precipice. “She did, didn’t she? She’s gone. I can feel it. She promised not to, did you know?” 

Corona snarls again, a perfect horror, raw in her grief and abandonment. When she speaks again, her voice is guttural with need.

“She was supposed to be mine.”

Well. Camilla isn’t going to unpack that. Instead, she shrugs and turns on her heel. Perhaps yesterday she would have felt empathy for this beautiful, broken girl.

Now all she feels is empty.

“Don’t come, then. You won’t be the first necromancer to die here.” 

Corona howls, somewhat self consciously.

Camilla doesn’t turn around.

Half an hour later, they sit on the landing pad together, arms on knees, and watch the planet turn towards night.

Camilla is shivering, though she isn’t cold.

Coronabeth moves to rest her foot against Camilla’s leg.

Neither of them says a word.


	2. Chapter 2

They wait. Camilla watches the sky shade to black and her brain, for want of something to distract from the great and howling hole in her chest, begins to process what she knows about the Emperor, about Lyctors, and about how much blood and death it took to get a signal off this rock.

She stands, dragging Corona to her feet by one delicate, finely boned wrist.

“We have to go.”

“What?” Corona’s voice peaks into an indignant squeak. “Camill _a_ , you dragged me out here, now you want me to _leave_?”

Camilla mutters something uncharitable under her breath and starts pulling her spluttering charge back to Canaan House.

“Answer me! You can’t just drag me around, I’m still _processing_. Camilla!”

“They’re going to kill us.”

“Wonderfully cryptic, thank you _so much,_ isn’t the Sixth supposed to be the knowledge house or something?”

“Think about it. Think how hard they tried to hide the secret. How many of us died. I saw them take Nonagesimus and Ianthe-“ Corona flinches at the name- “but what’s coming for us is a cleanup crew.” 

“Maybe it’s better that they do that.” Corona shrugs, wiggling her wrist out of Camilla’s grip and flexing her fingers. Her hair falls in her face, gold tarnished with blood. “Aren’t we like, the rejects anyway?”

Camilla doesn’t dignify this naked self pity with a response.

“At least it’s easier for you.” 

Camilla’s head swivels as if of its own accord. Her face is frozen, blank, and hard as stone.

“I mean-“ Corona backpedals, hasty, like someone who has just planted one foot confidently off a cliff. “It’s bad, still, obviously-“

“But not worse.” Camilla’s voice is hoarse with disbelief, but Corona just looks relieved, mistaking her words for the universe settling back into its true and proper orbit around her.

“I mean it’s shitty all round, but losing two people.... a sister, a twin, and it’s like she’s dead, and Babs was like a brother to me, really....”

She continues talking as Camilla’s shoulders stiffen into a single, tense line, her teeth fitting together like a vice.

A voice whispers at the back of her brain.

_Go loud_

“Second cousin.” 

“....what?” Corona blinks eyes still bloated and raw with crying.

“He was my second cousin.” She steps forward. Corona unconsciously takes a step back. “He was the youngest Master Warden in decades. He had terminally cold feet, and never picked up his dirty mugs, and lost his glasses constantly.”

Camilla advances, one step, two, closing the distance until she’s close enough to see the flecks of blood in Corona’s hairline and the spidery, broken veins around her bruise-purple eyes.

“He was my world. And we are not mentioning him again.” 

Corona nods, eyes wide, and Camilla can almost taste the fear rolling off her like pennies on her tongue.

“I don’t care how you feel about your turd of a sister. I don’t care about any of your fucking Third drama. You can follow me and shut up, or keep chattering and stay here to die.”

A nod? Sort of? Corona starts one, anyway, but seems to lose her nerve halfway through so it turns into a weird, pathetic little head waggle.

“Great.” Camilla scrubs wetness from her eyes with the heel of her hand. “Come on.”


	3. Chapter 3

They walk further back into the ruins of Canaan House, past small, sad heaps of bones where skeleton servants had fallen in their tracks. The air has a thick, meaty smell from Ianthe’s battle with Cytherea, overlaid with the greasy stink of.... something else.

Say what you like about bone magic, Camilla thinks ruefully, as they walk upstairs (not down, never down again, though awareness of the hatch tugs like a hook in both their spines), at least it’s relatively clean. 

Coronabeth is crying again. Dry, slightly hiccupy sobs that hitch with her footsteps.

“We need to find somewhere to hide.” Camilla isn’t sure who she’s talking to. Not Corona, whose hand has gone clammy in hers. Not herself, her brain still a white screen of flickering static. Maybe the ghost of a dry, acerbic voice, the slight glimmer of light on glass.

“Third is out. So’s Sixth. Ninth?” She shakes her head. “It’s the first place they’ll look. Kitchen has food, maybe knives, but-“ Camilla screws up her eyes tight, trying to squeeze some thought from the sodden rag that’s replaced her brain. “I- “ 

The floor seems to give out underneath her. 

_Shock_ , a familiar voice whispers in her ear, and she rolls her eyes weakly even as Canaan’s worn carpet rushes up to meet her. _Blood loss, maybe. When was the last time you ate?_

“Camilla!” 

Corona’s hand squeezes hers, unexpectedly strong, the remnants of manicured nails pressing perfect little half circles into the skin.

“Don’t you dare!” The young not-really-necromancer’s voice shakes, and Camilla wonders if this is about her or just being left alone again. “This is your pigheaded plan, Hect, and you’re not dying in the middle of it.” 

“Fuck you.” Mumbles Camilla, who, satisfied with this, passes out. 

Looking around, Corona worries at her lower lip, hard enough to send a little trickle of blood down her chin. She licks it off unconsciously, dragging her tongue over her lips for any remnant. 

Her eyes settle on a door. It is, mercifully, unlocked.

“Piss.” Corona sighs, hooks her hands under Camilla’s armpits, and prepares to drag.

——-

Camilla awakes to the feeling of a blanket being pulled over her body. She is still, it seems, fully dressed, but the thought is sweet.

Coronabeth is still, somehow, holding her hand. She jumps a mile when Camilla lets it go.

“You’re not dead!” Corona sounds happier about this than a fake necromancer should be. Camilla gives her a flat look.

“I’m fine. I just... it’s been a long day.” She pauses. “Thanks for dragging me in here.”

Corona looks away. “As far as I know you’re the only other person left.”

“Nonagesimus is around somewhere. I think.” Camilla looks at the ceiling. It’s got several new cracks. “She wasn’t outside when I woke up.”

“Gideon didn’t make it?” Corona blinks. Camilla, who isn’t sure what she saw when the Ninth Cavalier fell backwards into death and wasn’t really the type to intrude on a moment, keeps silent.

Corona sighs and lays her hand on the blanket. Her fingertips are streaked with little drops of blood, nailbeds nibbled down at the sides so that red wells up around and under them.

Camilla finds herself reaching out to touch her hand.

“Corona, if we start to mourn them now we’ll never stop.”

The younger woman gasps something like a laugh, something like a sob.

“That’s so fucking unhealthy.” 

“Yeah.” Camilla lays back down on her pillow and closes her eyes. “Wake me up when you’re tired.”

She doesn’t let go of her hand.


	4. Chapter 4

Coronabeth doesn’t wake her up when she gets tired. Camilla discovers this when she jerks awake with a thin band of light sneaking through the blackout curtains to fall across her face, her hand still clutched limply in Corona’s.

The girl is asleep, of course, her head listing gently to the side and her lips slightly open to emit soft, unbothered snores. With her blood-matted curls outlined in white light, her face finally at rest, she looks like one of those necrosaints that get painted delicately descending through the clouds in the better class of shrine. 

Camilla tries to summon enough spite to wake her.

She can’t.

It’s just- it’s so quiet, here, and despite her advice Camilla is glad that Corona dragged her up to the Sixth’s rooms. They smell familiar, like dust and detergent and the sweet, acrid scent of the oil she uses on her blades. 

The blankets carry something else, too: a clean, slightly soapy aroma cut with the faint tang of antiseptic. Camilla inhales as deep as she can, and her heart seems to overflow up her throat and through her eyes, thick grief filling her mouth and prickling red-hot at her eyelids.

She can’t tell what aches are his absence and what are injuries. Camilla finds herself thankful for this. 

Subtly, she shifts into the hollow left by his body (as best she can, they are- were- very different shapes) and looks at Corona again. The grief comes a second time, dizzying as vertigo, but now it’s harder edged.

They have both survived when they shouldn’t, cast-offs from something huge and terrible that doesn’t even see their losses as losses.

The fact that Corona wanted to be involved and Camilla didn’t- it doesn’t even matter, right now. Camilla takes her in, the missing earring, the torn clothes, the bags forming under her smeared eye makeup.

She finds, unexpectedly, that she cares.

Corona stirs, yawns with her tongue and teeth on full show like a cat. 

“Morning, Cammy.”

“Call me that again,” Camilla says, struggling to sit up, “and I’ll feed you to the hatch.”


	5. Chapter 5

Of course, they can’t stay in the Sixth House rooms forever. As easy as it would be to do so: as much as Camilla wants to turn the key in the lock and seal the door shut, turning the place into a tomb.

Corona doesn’t help her up. She’s folded in on herself again, silent, carding her fingers through the ruin of her hair. It isn’t making any of her situation better, but it isn’t making it substantially worse either.

“Food.” Camilla manages, getting to her feet and flexing her arms experimentally. The rest has helped, a little, and she can ignore the ache of what remains unhealed. 

Corona looks up.

“We need food. Which means the kitchens.” Camilla isn’t being strictly truthful here. There’s a stash of energy bars, somewhere, because Palamedes likes to eat them when he’s deep in research and doesn’t want to stop. Easy to digest, easy to unwrap without looking, fuel more than anything. 

The idea of Coronabeth eating them makes her feel physically sick.

“What about the cleanup crews?” Corona is chewing at a hangnail now, with the distracted focus of a dog worrying at a bone. She seems comfortable with this, at least: orders given for her to question.

Camilla rebuckles her knives at her hips and shrugs.

“Stand back?”

Something behind Corona’s eyes fades, or hardens. Camilla isn’t sure if she cares or not. She doesn’t want Coronabeth to die. She isn’t so sure about keeping her happy.

The knives in place, Camilla crosses to the door, pushes it open without a second glance.

“I’m going.”

Corona stands up and pads after her.

Canaan House is much as they left it. The very air seems to have stood still- the ever present smell of dust and mould thickened with the aroma of blood. 

It feels like walking through a tomb.

Camilla puts her hand to the small of her back, rests her fingers on the twin scabbards of her knives. Wearing them openly still feels strange, even after everything that’s happened. He never told her that the charade was over. 

Behind her, Corona trails a finger over the peeling wallpaper, tracing the ragged edge where it exposes the wall beneath.

It’s worse as they return to the main levels, pass the ruins of the entrance hall (Camilla’s stomach drops past her feet into the basement, and she keeps looking ahead, one foot in front of the other, until they pass) and the dining room. Great rents are gouged out of the walls and ceiling, and the floor is ankle deep in bones. 

“There’s nobody here.” Coronabeth’s voice is glassy and brittle, too loud, and Camilla doesn’t bother to suppress her wince.

“Look.” She points to the drifts of bone, the great trenches left in it by the construct that lives on only in Camilla’s aching ribs. “Nobody’s been this way, and yet it should have been one of the first places they looked.” Corona’s words waver. “They didn’t come back.”

Her eyes turn on Camilla, purple as a bruise. “They’ve left us. Like we’re not even worth killing?” Her voice spikes towards hysteria again. “Camilla? Camilla, what are we going to do?”

And just like that, Camilla can’t bear it any more. The twist in Corona’s voice is like a hook in her mouth, and she wants to tear it out, raw and bloody, expose the wound to open air.

“Work it out.” The words force themselves through her teeth like bullets. Coronabeth blinks, steps forwards.

“I asked you a question?”

“And I answered.” Camilla stands her ground, stance loose, her hands creeping back to her knives. “I’m not your fucking caretaker, Tridentarius.”

Corona breathes in sharply, as if she’s been slapped.

“Pardon me, I thought I could, like, rely on you or something?” She bares teeth still faintly pink with her own blood. “Seeing as we’re stuck here together.”

“We are not together.” Camilla advances, her voice dead calm. “I don’t make choices for you. You are not-“ there it is, the break, the crack in the ice. “You’re not _mine_.”

Coronabeth is close now, so close, and she smells like blood and sweat and, very faintly, flowers. It’s like standing, swaying, on the edge of a cliff. Waiting to jump, or walk away.

Corona kisses her.

Her mouth tastes disgusting. Metallic, and funky, like something’s rotting back there. Her kiss is all teeth and hands fisted in Camilla’s hair, desperate, drowning.

“I could be.” A murmur against the skin of her neck, Corona leaning into her and god undying, she’s warm.

Camilla draws back and lets out a long, ragged breath.

It isn’t what she wants, and it can’t be what she needs. She knows that. She knows what he would say.

She closes her eyes.

She kisses Corona again.


End file.
